Because the rainfall is so great here, digging is usually not difficult, but during a rare dry spell it was not uncommon for my father to break a shovel. He always kept a spare in a small attic in the stone barn behind the cottage: a topsy-turvy space that my mother constantly reminded him to keep tidier than he did. Could my father’s life have been as quiet as he wished it to be, if he had actually taken on board some of the advice my mother barked at him, or would she just have found more shortcomings to chastise him about? It is hard to say. I try now, as an older man who spends time underneath matters, to see more of what made her what she was: the story under the story, what it took for her to hold everything together, in a house of cows, chickens and men that were invariably either uncommunicative, crapulous, clumsy and hungry, if not all four at the same time. Heavy responsibility and lightness of manner cannot easily go hand in hand. What I do know is that my father rarely remembered to do any of the tasks that she shouted at him to do and, because of that, I know that on the day that she dislodged the shovel from the attic space and it fell on his head, it would have been in a precarious position, and because of that, it is questionable whether she can be blamed directly for his death.

I can picture the scene now: my mother on the ladder, growling her dismay at the disorder of my father’s tools, her hands busy above her, rummaging. My father directly below, staring at his dusty boots, uttering not a word, waiting for the storm to pass. The shovel falls and the sharp metal blade hits the softest part of his temple. The end of his life was not slow, although part of me suspects that my mother’s verbal annihilation of his character continued for a minute or two, even after he passed from this world into the next. It is hard not to note the irony that so many heavy objects had been propelled towards him over the years – earthenware mugs, griddles, trays, china birds, plates – and he’d lived through it all, yet the one that finished him off was the one she accidentally sent in his direction.